Global warming put on hold for a few decades

TgDaily, 11th January 2010

Opinion That sound you can hear is climate scientists desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel in a failed bid to maintain the credibility of AGW.

While most of the northern hemisphere shivers in the coldest winter for 30 years, most people now regard the doom-laden prophesies of anthropogenic global warming "climate experts" with more than a little healthy scepticism.

Now one of the world's "top climate experts", Professor Mojib Latif (no, we hadn't heard of him either) says that the world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next two or three decades.

But that doesn't stop Latif, from the Leibniz Institute at Germany's Kiel University and an author on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from maintaining that this is merely a 30 year blip and that we're all still doomed to fry in the heat-death of the planet at an unspecified future date.

He says that changes in ocean currents known as the North Atlantic Oscillation will slow - and even reverse - global warming for the next few decades and adds quietly that the fluctuations could, err, also have been responsible for any increases in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.

Says Latif: "A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles - perhaps as much as 50 percent. They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer."

He also says that retreating glaciers and ice sheets will become a thing of the past; global warming has paused; and there may well be some overall cooling.

But unsurprisingly for one of the thousands of people who make a comfortable living out of the AGW religious cult, Latif maintains that the next 30 years of freezing temperatures is only a temporary respite rather than meaning that man-made global warming is nothing but an expensive charade.

But of course, Latif will have retired in 30 years' time and won't be around to take the flak for the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted in absurd carbon trades and people being taxed back into the Stone Age in the name of saving the polar bear.

No doubt he fondly believes he'll be sunning himself on a beach in the sub-tropical paradise of Alaska.